Trying something new

For the past couple of weeks I have found my training plateauing. My yearly running rut was upon me. It seems like once or twice a year the emotional joy I have with running and the adrenaline rush that results from it ends up decreasing to a certain point. Instead of ignoring this feeling, I succumbed to it and refocused my attention to cooking and other activities.

However, once a runner always a runner because it is an emotional joy like no other. I became restless and did some soul searching to figure out why exactly I fell off my training line. I needed to get back in the grind and what better way to get back into something than by going all in.

My solution was simple: ignore excuses and run as much as possible as often as possible. In this way I could reset my training and get back into a rhythm. Sometimes you just need to shake up things to get back on track rather than having it settle.

So for the past couple of days I have adopted my, probably not the athlete's favorite, two-a-day run routine. These workouts tax you and are exhausting, especially when you are resetting your training. However, I am a couple days in of doing a long run at least once every 12 hours.

Though it has been only a few days so far, I have found that my emotional joy and rush are coming back rejuvenated. I think that this experience just goes to show that we all encounter ruts, things settle, and one way to get out of it is to not only realize the rut exists but to shake things up and go all in.

This is by no means advice for anyone to attempt, it works for me since my running experience informs me of doing these types of non-traditional stints.